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China and the U.S. are racing to establish a permanent presence on the moon with the explicit mission of mining – and exploiting – lunar resources.
It’s 2041 and at the Artemis Base Camp on the rim of the Shackleton Crater, an American space mining engineer and his Japanese colleague are sipping coffee, scowling at the latest headline: Elsewhere in the Aitken Basin, the Chinese have found yet another rich deposit of Helium-3, not far from their International Lunar Research Station, the one they constructed with the Russians in 2036.
This hasn’t happened yet, but it’s not science fiction. It’s the genuine ambition of the United States and China — among others — to establish a permanent presence on the moon with the explicit mission of mining – and exploiting – lunar resources.
The moon is not just a cold rock circling the earth, it’s a vast repository of Helium-3, water ice, and important metals like silicon, titanium, and aluminum. All those resources are critical not just for setting up a permanent human presence on the moon, but for expanding manned exploration farther into the solar system.
